»Novell has rolled out a comprehensive support channel for Linux involving six levels of service and hundreds of support engineers aimed at supporting Ximian desktop products and SUSE's Linux distribution. The company also announced it is providing the Ximian Exchange Connector, a tool that enables Linux clients to connect to Exchange servers via Ximian's Evolution mail client, under the GNU public license.

»Sun and Veritas agreed to work on a port of Veritas' products to Sun's budding x86 hardware line.

»SCOWatch: Novell has asked a federal judge to toss out SCO's "slander of title" suit against it. That's the suit that alleges Novell's claim that SCO doesn't own as much of UNIX as it thinks it does has hurt SCO's business by causing companies to hang back from caving in to SCO's threats to sue the world. The judge has taken the request under advisement.

Mandrake patched rsync to fix a bug that could allow for unintended files to be overwritten with arbitrary content.

Tips of the Trade

So you've read all the complaining (or sub-enthusiastic mumbling) about GNOME 2.6, and you'd like to test it out for yourself. The problem is, it's nowhere to be found. It's been the policy of the GNOME project for a few years now to not provide binary packages, leaving the packaging to distributors. There's some wisdom in that approach, especially since distributors have a habit of preferring their own builds and configuration anyhow. But that doesn't make it very easy if you're trying to assess the next big thing coming out of the project.

Fortunately, for GNOME, there's GARNOME, which provides a middle ground between the tedium of building packages one-by-one on your own and the fear and trembling involved in building an entire desktop environment from the CVS repository.

GARNOME automates the download, configuration, and compilation of GNOME source packages and creates a GNOME installation that runs with few dependencies on the rest of the operating system, and without disturbing an existing, established GNOME installation of an older vintage.

GARNOME has not been updated to reflect GNOME's 2.6 release. There are, however, instructions available to download and use the GARNOME still in development via GNU TLA. Just pay a visit to this site and follow the instructions.